A long and complex X-ray fluoroscopy intervention can imply the application of a significant cumulative X-ray dose to a patient. Modern X-ray practice encourages the application of an X-ray dose which is as low as reasonably possible (the so-called “ALARA” principle). Therefore, a goal of medical imaging professionals is to reduce the radiation dose needed for an interventional procedure. Such dose reduction can cause an increase in noise in the resulting X-ray images. Therefore, there exists a trade-off between reducing a dose applied during an X-ray examination, and improving noise characteristics.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,224,141 discloses a system which processes static portions of a medical image using a frame-filling approach.
EP 1550981 A2 discloses a system and method for image noise reduction using a minimal error spatio-temporal recursive filter.
EP 1315367 A2 discloses a method and system for improving a color image separable into three color components.
FR 2790562 A1 discloses an optical device for mixing images and its application to the visor of a helmet.
KERVRANN C: “PEWA: Patch-based exponentially weighted aggregation for image denoising”, ADVANCES IN NEURAL INFORMATION PROCESSING SYSTEMS 27, vol. 3, 1 Jan. 2014, pages 2150-2158 discloses patch-based Exponentially Weighted Aggregation for image denoising.